One of the last projects I sold when I was working as a literary agent was a fantastic book called The Bliss Experiment by Sean Meshorer. The book has just been published by Atria, and I’m delighted to share with you a Q &A I did with Sean via email recently.

THE BLISS EXPERIMENT

28 Days to Personal Transformation

Sean Meshorer

A cross between The Power of Now and The Happiness Project, The Bliss Experiment reveals how to tap into the innate state of joy that resides in all of us: bliss.

HAPPINESS IS GOOD. BLISS IS BETTER.

We have a higher standard of living and more ways to fulfill every desire than ever. Yet we remain unhappy because happiness isn’t what we truly want. What we seek is bliss: a complete spiritual state where happiness, profound meaning, and enduring truth converge. With it come unshakeable joy, interconnectedness, and wisdom. It offers a solution to both personal and societal suffering. The book includes stories, over 300 scientific studies and exercises that have worked, time and again, for people from all walks of life.

Sean Meshorer is a spiritual teacher and New Thought minister based in Los Angeles. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in philosophy and religious studies. He spent fifteen years meditating, studying, practicing, and living in an ashram and spiritual community in Northern California. Sean lives with daily, chronic pain from a serious back injury and finds bliss nonetheless.

1) Define bliss. What does it mean to you and why do you see it as such an important goal for all of us?

Bliss is an inward experience of happiness. With it comes a complete feeling of inner peace, contentment, love, connectedness and joy that dwells inside each and every one of us, no matter our background, religion, age, gender, genetics, or life experience. It exists entirely independent of our external circumstances, including negative ones. Once we discover bliss inside, it’s something that we can confidently know to be a permanent and positive inner resource that’s always with, no matter what’s happening around us.

2) What would you say to people who dismiss the possibility of bliss as fluffy, new-agey, or unrealistic?

According to a recent study published by the Pew Research Center, almost half of all Americans have had a bliss experience and they come from every religion (and no religion) and background across the spectrum. So it has nothing to do with anything new age, or even unconventional. These kinds of experiences are happening all over the place and in all kinds of people but they’re not always well-understood and there’s a great reluctance to talk about them–and most people don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about it. And the 50% of people who haven’t had a bliss experience probably haven’t just because no one has ever told them they have that potential or how to realize it. Once you know, it’s not that hard to have at least a glimpse of taste of it. And even a moment of bliss can completely transform your life.

3) I’m a big fan of Gretchen Rubin and her Happiness Project, as are many of my readers and followers. What is the relationship between happiness and bliss?

Happiness is an important way-station on the way to bliss but by itself it’s incomplete. Happiness is based on external circumstances–whether lower-order pleasures or higher-order positive relationships–that is itself fleeting. Happiness ebbs and flows. For example, we might go out for a night of drinking with friends and a loved one and it’s all highly enjoyable but what happens the next morning? The hangover comes. Even the most optimistic positive psychologist will readily tell you that it’s impossible to be happy all of the time. Bliss is different: once we know it’s there and learn to access it, it can always be with us, no matter our external circumstances–even when bad things like unemployment, illness, or relationship problems are happening in our lives.

4) What are the greatest obstacles or roadblocks to experiencing bliss?

There are three major obstacles. The biggest obstacle is not knowing that we have the potential to experience it. Awareness is truly half the battle. Second, we have to learn to stop looking for authentic joy outside of ourselves–especially in wealth, material objects, sex, romance, beauty, fame, or power. These outward things distract us from looking inward, which is the only place that genuine bliss dwells. Finally, we have to learn how to control and quiet our own minds, especially the myriad negative thoughts, feelings, and images that so many of us experience on a daily basis. These are like cloudy ripples on the surface of our mind, creating mental disturbances that prevent us from having the peace and clarity necessary for noticing the quiet reservoir of bliss that lurks beneath the surface of our agitated minds.

5) Is it possible to attain bliss if one is facing a major challenge like divorce, job loss, a cancer diagnosis, a child’s learning or developmental disorder, or a chronic health condition? How have you achieved bliss despite your own struggles, losses, suffering, and challenges?

Absolutely. In fact, not only is it possible but ultimately when life is going poorly, it’s the single best and most effective resource we can have to help ourselves rise above whatever outer challenges we’re facing. No one–and I mean no one–has a perfectly turbulent-free life. None of us can fully control our circumstances–some, yes, but never fully–but what we can learn to control is our internal response to difficult circumstances.

6) Give my readers 5 concrete strategies they can use to bring more bliss to their daily lives.

1. Don’t look for fulfillment in things like money, material objects, fame, beauty, sex, or power. It’s not that those things are bad, it’s that they’re neutral. Empty vessels. The only thing that gives them meaning is the inward meaning that we bring to them. The faster we understand that, the faster we can turn our attention inward.

2. Learn how to release the past, forgive others, and stop ruminating about the bad things that have happened to you. The more you dwell on that, the more miserable you make yourself.

3. Practice being aware of this present moment. Right now. Don’t live in the past or the future. The present moment is all there really is, it’s where everything happens, and it’s the doorway to bliss. If we pull ourselves too far out of this moment, not only do we stress ourselves out, we miss the positive opportunities in front of us.

4. Learn how to harness and control your mind. For most of us, our minds are seriously out of control. We have up to 50,000 thoughts per day and even someone who is just average and not severely depressed, at least half of those are needlessly negative. That’s a lot of negativity that courses through us all day, every day. If we can be aware of that and then learn how to reduce those needlessly negative thoughts, we can realize very fast gains in our happiness.

5. Practice giving something positive back into the world. Be nice to people, give them a smile, act selflessly whenever possible, practice compassion towards others. Happiness and unhappiness are highly contagious–we pass emotions back and forth in as little as a second–so be aware that what your’e doing and how you’re behaving is actually affecting others and quite literally changing the world. Studies show that the emotions we transmit directly to someone then end up transmitted by that person to complete strangers who didn’t come into contact with us. So if you want the world to be a better place, realize that it has to start with you.

7) As someone who’s kept a quote book since 7th grade and shares inspiring and motivating quotations daily on Facebook and Twitter, I especially liked the section of your book on the positive practice of affirmations. At one point, you say “while often seen as excessively self-helpy, affirmations are anything but New Age . . . [but rather] are based on the neural operations inside our brain.” Can you explain how and why you’ve overcome your distaste for affirmations and come to see them as crucially important to cultivating resilience, achieving success at work and in our relationships, and attaining bliss?

I’m the first to admit that affirmations can sound embarrassingly new age. That’s certainly what I thought until I stumbled across more than a dozen scientific studies that prove they work, including one that showed inner-city, African-American schoolchildren could almost entirely close the test score gap with their white, middle-class peers solely by affirming their abilities and self-worth. There’s something scientists call Hebbian Theory which basically means, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” If we repeat affirmations in a certain way with repetition, it actually helps create new neural pathways in our brains that in turn give us the brain resources necessary to make whatever we’re affirming a reality, whether that’s workplace success, relationship improvement, or spiritual realization. That’s the key: most of the deepest and hardest personality changes also require our brain grooves to change–and it turns out that affirmations are one of the most effective techniques to enable this.

How would you apply the principles, attitudes, and actions of your work on bliss to the act of parenting?

No one needs the inner experience of bliss more than parents! The more chaotic, stressful–and exhausting–our outward life, the more crucial it is that we cultivate the inner resources to deal with that. It’s really not the difficult or time consuming to practice some of the bliss techniques.As a parent, you might only have a few minutes here and there, bliss practices can help us go on an instant vacation, revitalizing and centering ourselves very quickly. Most importantly, bliss helps us stay centered in the moment, helping us rein in our fears, anxieties, and negative emotions. We can actually come to enjoy and appreciate our family time much more–plus feel confident that we have the inner resources to deal with whatever challenges our children throw our way!

9) How would you define the word resilience? What is the relationship between resilience and bliss?

In one sense, resilience is a sub-aspect of bliss. To be blissful is to be perfectly resilient, among other things. In another sense, bliss supersedes the need for resilience which implies that we’ve been knocked around but found a way to rebound. When we learn how to access and feel our full inner resources, we often don’t get shaken to begin with. As my own teacher said, “We learn to stand unshaken amidst the crash of breaking worlds.” But of course, that’s not always the case. Often, we are thrown for a loop by life circumstances but ultimately the only thing we can truly control is our own response to whatever is happening outside us. Bliss and its attendant practices give us the techniques and resources needed to bounce back from whatever negative is going on–and often very quickly.

10) Why do you think I chose to represent your book? What values and aspirations do we share? What similarities do you see between my experience and yours, my approach to life and yours? Why will readers of The Anti-Romantic Child or followers of my Facebook page like your book?

Priscilla, you are one of the most hopeful, joyful, and positively infectious people I know! You instinctively try to find the good in a situation which is one of the foundational mindsets necessary for finding bliss. Like many of us, you’ve also suffered greatly in your personal life but instead of it destroying you, you’ve found ways to learn and grow from it–and then share that with others. These are all aspects of the bliss process. I think, too, we have a shared background–private schools, high academic achievement combined with a certain kind of intellectual training and approach, and even similar types of families in which we’re raised. You get where I’m coming from and where I’m trying to go. In The Anti-Romantic Child there’s this kind of intersection between intellectual understanding and practical experience, that attempt to actually apply your love of poetry, Wordsworth, and the feelings and ideas represented by that to your daily life–and all woven into a compelling personal story. You merge together two worlds that often seem, or can be, separate. You insist on exploring how Wordsworth really does apply to the experiences and lessons of daily life. The Bliss Experiment shares this sensibility. I needed to merge together my intellectual background and rigorous scientific studies with my own practical experiences in these past 15 years, while telling not only my own story but those of dozens of interesting people that I met along the way.